View all Grocery Coupons & Grocery Deals

Bigfoot Moods

Bigfoot Moods: "Enter The Bigfoot Moods Sweepstakes for your chance to win a Bigfoot the Monster toy."

Intentions schmentions

Hello and Happy August!

Can you believe that summer is almost over? I don't know where the months have gone. But here I am making what is apparently my biannual post on my blog. Maybe that's what I should re-name it "Biannual Blog : A Busy Person's Sad Attempt at a Hobby." Catchy, huh? At the time of my last post lo those many months ago, I truly intended to begin writing weekly. "It will be easy," I thought,"I'll just jump online after the kids are asleep, whip out the blog in a minute or two and head off to bed." But like so many other intentions, that quickly went by the way side. Eventually so many weeks had gone by without fulfilling that intention that I started thinking "Well, it's too late now." I felt really badly about it, but almost didn't know how to begin again, especially after all of my big talk about new years, new resolutions, etc. Yeah, right. I couldn't even look at my blog page, truth be told. It was as if I had made a promise to a friend and then broken it. The idea of seeing that friend face to face and having to own up to my shortcomings, admit that I had for lack of a better word lied, was too much. I couldn't muster the strength. Better to lay low, hide-out, let it blow over. Cowardly, to be sure, but even more-so when the person you are afraid to confront is yourself.

So here I am, failed intentions and all, beginning again...again. I won' t make any lofty promises to you, whosoever may be out there reading this blog, or to myself. All I will say is that I am hoping, wanting and expecting to revisit my telling of Ainsley's arrival and subsequent years of life, including Owen's journey into the world, very soon.

But maybe don't hold your breath. :-)

Until tomorrow...

Nanner

A New Year, A New Day a New Blog

So here it is, January, the beginning of  a new year, new goals, new resolutions... and a new post to my blog (finally!)  The fact that I have not written since August only serves to illustrate how busy the life of a mom (and dad) can be.  Like most parents of young children, I consider myself lucky if I find the time to shower each morning and pass a brush through my hair let alone time to indulge in other personal endeavors, such as writing.  But since this is the time for setting goals for ourselves and holding ourselves accountable, I am back at my blog vowing to write if not every day at least two or three times a week. :-)

With that goal in mind, I will keep this short. Tomorrow I will begin anew in the telling of my journey into motherhood, such that it might help you in some small way navigate the slippery slope of parenthood yourself. :-)  I am also planning to begin a product reviews section (of which I have MANY, being the opinionated mass consumer that I am!) so do check back for that.

For now I will leave you with some simple words of inspiration to tackle your own resolutions this week:

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man." -Benjamin Franklin

Until tomorrow..
Nanner

 

Nine Months,...or not quite

We all know it takes nine months to make a baby.  Okay, well it probably only takes a couple of minutes or so to MAKE a baby, but 9 months for it to develop and be ready for life outside of the womb.  What you may not know, is that it "9 months" is really "38-40 weeks" which is really almost 10 months, which is a really long time to walk around with a mini-me living inside of you, stealing your food, your air, your space, your sleep, your sanity.  So maybe that's why my daughter tried to cut that journey short and enter the world at only 32 weeks along.  Maybe she was just being considerate, thinking of me, feeling guilty after overhearing some seriously disgruntled words come from mommy's mouth over the course of, well, her lifetime. (sorry for that, kiddo.)  Maybe she was just trying to give me a break.

It had been a long 32 weeks up until that point.  Just a few days after that late-summer eve when I learned I was pregnant I began experiencing that dreaded pregnancy malady, morning sickness.  Which really should be called something more appropriate like "anytime sickness," or "all the time sickness" or "someone-get-me-off-of this-boat-already sickness."  For me it truly was worst in the mornings. Many days I was going into work late, disheveled, miserable and probably very unproductive. The exact opposite of someone who a manager hopes to have as an employee.  I tried ginger ale, preggy pops, crackers, pretzels, Tums, eating several small meal a day, all of the usual remedies, with not much relief.  Then I read about taking a Vitamin B6 pill and 1/2 of a Unisom each night before bed, so I gave that a whirl.  It helped some, but left me with a 'sleep hangover' that I didn't like. Eventually my doctor prescribed Zofran and let me say, it really did work! But even though he reassured me that it was completely safe, I was afraid to take it too often, so I reserved it for those days when the "I-think-I-just-puked-up-my-toenails sickness" was at it's worst.

Eventually, like most women who experience nausea, the feeling subsided and I started to feel like myself again. (albeit a rounder, more voraciously-eating version of myself.)  Most pregnancy books will say this should happen around week 12-13.  For me it took until around week 16, but it DID go away! Woo-hoo!  Sadly it was quickly replaced with a new and more scary ailment: fainting.  Most of us have probably seen an old movie from the 50's or 60's somewhere along the way where the mommy-to-be swoons, faints then is tenderly carried to the couch to rest and recuperate while some strong man or wiser, older female figure gently chastises her for over-doing it in her ever-so-delicate condition. Well, let me just say, when it actually happens to you it is much less romantic and glamorous.  I was standing in the copy room at work waiting for a few copies to print when all of a sudden the world went black and fuzzy.  My knees buckled under me and my arms flailed about, awkwardly trying to grab hold of something on my way to the floor. I succeeded only in knocking my head on the edge of the copier.  I was out a few seconds when I began blinking back to life, seeing before me the concerned face of a fellow co-worker whom I didn't know very well, asking me if I was ok.  Was I ok?  I didn't know.  Let's see if I could sit up.  Yes, I could.  Maybe I could stand. No, I couldn't. Eventually I got up on my feet, laughed the incident off and hoped it wouldn't happen again.  It did.  Quite a few times in fact.  My doctor determined that I had extremely low blood pressure (my lowest reading was around 83 over 50, to which my doc replied it was amazing I was even able to walk around upright. lol)  The cure: add more salt to my diet.  Salt??  Every book I had read and every instinct I had told me that salt was the enemy of pregnant women. And here I was being instructed to add more of it to my diet.  Weird.  But it helped and by about week 22 I was no longer passing out (thank goodness!) 

Weeks 23-32 passed somewhat uneventfully.  Aside from the normal complaints that were growing along with my belly (indigestion, difficulty sleeping, etc) things were peachy. Weeks 32 to birth were a different story..and my next blog. :-)

Nanner

The making of a Mom

The smell of fall was in the air even as the late summer sun tickled my skin, when a thought occurred to me out of the fading blue sky:  I was going to be a mom.  A parent.  Responsible for another human being's every waking, breathing, sleeping, eating, crying, laughing, pooping, puking moment.  I would love to say the thought filled me with joy, but the truth is I was shocked, numb and generally scared, if not "to death," to within an inch of my life. 

I had always planned to become a mother one day.  When I was a child I used to claim I wanted 12 children, with dubiously chosen names, like "Serendipity" and "Wilcox." But when I found myself turning 30 with no children in tow and no soulmate to boot, I began to rethink my entire plan for my life.  Maybe having a husband wasn't necessary.  Maybe kids weren't either.  Maybe I needed to create a new vision for myself, one that involved ME as the main character, traveling around the world, learning new languages, experiencing new cultures, really LIVING!  But as exciting as that was, it could have its drawbacks, I thought. First there's the money factor.  I mean, flying isn't cheap.  And traveling to foreign countries alone isn't really safe.  Plus there's all that packing and unpacking and worrying about whether or not to drink the water.  And really, how was I going to travel the world hither and yon for any length of time when I hadn't even managed to move more than an hour away from my family before because I got too homesick?  Time for Plan C.  So instead of setting off on a whirlwind adventure that I wasn't so sure I even wanted, simply to escape my lonely life, I went the modern route: to the Internet, Jeeves!  

Internet dating had wooed me once before in my mid-twenties with disastrous results (that's another blog..a long one) so I was wary of trying it again.  But when you are a 30-year-old single woman who has dreams of marriage, children and family but who hasn't, in recent years, had more than a couple of mostly casual  2-3 month relationships, you'll pretty much try anything! So after checking out a few different dating sites I decided to try www.date.com because it was free to post a profile AND read your e-mails.  You only had to pay if you wanted to send an e-mail yourself.  Being both lonely and frugal I decided this was the place for me.  I took advantage of the "show interest" option that came with the free package and nervously checked a box next to the user name of a guy who caught my eye. Would he like my profile?  Would he respond?  Would he wonder why a fab girl like me was still single at the ripe age of 3-0?  Would we hit it off?  Would this be the One? Would I please stop asking myself these ridiculous questions already??  Then..there it was.  An e-mail.  From him.  (squeal!)  OMG, I feel like a teenager again just typing this.  Anyway, he wrote me a very nice note, the verbage of which I forget, but I'm sure it had something to do with how beautiful I was and how my answers to the profile questions were so incredibly witty and well -written, at the end of which he provided his personal e-mail address so that I could write him back without having to sign up to pay for doing so.  Smart move, 'cause cute as his profile picture was and all I'm not entirely sure I would have shelled out the $14.95 or whatever it was just to say "Hi."  (ok, I probably would have, but moving on...)  Some time later we met in person and sometime after that we got married. (but that part of the story is another blog, too. :-))

The outcome of this blessed union was a surprise wedding gift, the kind of which you have to wait 9 months to unwrap.  So there I was on that late summer day realizing for the first time that my life was about to completely change forever and that I had not only taken on the title of "wife" just a few scant weeks before, but would now be becoming a "mom" too.  

This, my new baby of sorts, will follow my life from that point forward to share with all of those who are interested how someone like me transforms from a woman to a mom, and what she learns along the way. Some lessons come easily while others are hard-learned, but each day brings new realizations and reasons to laugh, cry and rejoice in all that is "motherhood."

Join me on my journey ...  I could use the adult conversation!  

Nanner